Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Can anybody with an iota of common sense and a grain of love for our Holy Mother suggest that it’s my daughter Alice Bhatti’s fault that there were no doves or white pigeons, which the committee always expects to see at such occasions?

The same committee that took less than nine months to bestow sainthood on a Polish nun in our neighbouring country, despite overwhelming evidence from the local community that she was nothing but a stingy old witch who revelled in the suffering of dark-skinned, malnourished children, didn’t even bother to investigate the sublime acts associated with my daughter Alice Bhatti. There is justifiable anger in the Choohra community that this case was either never sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, or, if it was sent, then crucial evidence was misrepresented or deliberately misplaced.

The attitude of the National Diocese was not very different either. The same fathers who encourage the celebration of a man-made and very commonplace statue stuck in a cave that might or might not have shed some tears seventy-three years ago undermined Alice Bhatti’s case for sainthood by ignoring various other testimonies that bore witness to the miraculous and blessed nature of that evening.

Perhaps the Divine Will knows the working of the devious minds that trade in our Holy Mother’s name, turn God’s house into a centre for commerce of the souls and plot their next land grab or scheme to get more money out of the Vatican’s wealthy friends by portraying their native followers as illiterate wretches. How else can you explain that on the morning after that blessed night, out of a clear blue sky, without warning, without any thunder and not a cloud on the horizon, lightning struck the Old Doctor — a two-hundred-year-old peepul tree that had survived three hurricanes and generations of Sacred patients who chopped bits off it for firewood. Sister Alice Bhatti had taken many a serene lunch break under its shadow. Such was the impact of the lightning that the tree split into two, smoke emanated from it for days and never a leaf grew on it ever again.

Freak weather phenomenon was all the Committee had to say about it, as if it wasn’t a committee to validate the claims of a holy apparition but a club of amateur meteorologists.

It’s self-evident that the Committee’s negative verdict was the result of the same prejudices that the local diocese has shown towards what they prefer to call lower castes. They claim to be Yassoo’s children, but at heart they remain devotees of the Hindu goddess Kali, always judging people by their ancestry rather than their devotion to our Lord Yassoo and what they do for Yassoo’s children.

It was asked in their meetings, although the Committee never put it on record, that if it really was our Holy Mother revealing herself, then why wouldn’t she reveal herself to a Catholic from a good churchgoing family and of good education, instead of a junior nurse of questionable character?

And they did make a big deal of her character.

The Committee was quick to pounce on the biographical details and reproduced a number of rumours, as the unfortunate expression goes here, as the gospel truth. They accused her of fornicating with a godless communist in her student days. In another example of their callous approach, they called her a penis-slasher and a Xanax thief. As a grieving father, I suffered the additional trauma of having to read these allegations. They said that she had walked out on her loving husband and was living in sin with another woman, a senior nurse, and that the two of them planned to raise a bastard child as husband and wife. It’s unfortunate because this filth presented as the Committee’s findings — mere rumours, unsubstantiated allegations and lewd innuendoes that are the fate of any working lady in this place — have become a matter of canonical record. Can we blame the poor fathers in our French Colony when they prefer not to send their girls to work?

The Committee of course thought that it clinched the argument by claiming that Alice Bhatti had spent two years in the Borstal jail after a conviction on charges of ‘disorderly behaviour with intent to murder’. First of all this is factually incorrect: she was sentenced to eighteen months but she spent only fourteen months there and her sentence was reduced for good behaviour and exemplary moral character. And also, how can spending time in jail automatically be a proof of someone’s guilt? Did our Lord Yassoo not spend two nights in the Sanhedrin’s prison? As the Committee was writing its verdict with a pen dipped in the poison of prejudice, weren’t there hundreds of thousands of our Lord Yassoo’s followers languishing in prisons all over the world for saying His name or circulating a photocopied page from the Holy Bible, or just for believing in their hearts that Yassoo was the son of God? Try shouting that out in a public square in this place and you’ll be lucky if you only end up in a jail and are not lynched on the spot.

There was a piece of photographic evidence that the Committee claims it lost; they claim they saw it, but, since they weren’t sure of its authenticity, it was sent to the Colorado Institute of Authentification of Pictures and Symbols and was lost in the mail. According to the Committee’s notes, “It’s a blurred picture but you can see a peacock, its wings stretched upwards, and framed in it was a head shot of Alice Bhatti as if she was dressed for a fancy-dress party.”

What were they thinking? Do they think that our poorly paid nurses with twelve-hour, six-day shifts, with a one-and-a-half-hour commute on each side have the time to go to fancy-dress parties? In peacock costumes?

I, Joseph Bhatti, father of Alice Joseph Bhatti, retired janitor for the Municipal Corporation, resident of French Colony, have been compelled to make this petition because Bishop Massey wrote in a side note that the peacock motif was a clever ploy to appeal to the European members of the Committee who make up the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, to give a touch of the exotic to this rather implausible fable and play upon the members’ preconceived notion of our country.

In their so-called investigation, the Committee didn’t take into consideration the biographical detail, which has been substantiated from multiple sources, that when Alice was twelve, I, her father Joseph Bhatti, rescued a baby peacock from the sewer and gifted it to her soon after her mother had been taken by Him. In my line of work I have rescued dead and almost alive human foetuses, hens, kittens, piglets, jewellery boxes and more puppies than I care to remember. It was said in the report that Alice Bhatti had claimed that she was brought up by a peacock mother. I am sure she said no such thing. It was a peacock, a male peacock, a dumb pet, and it had no hand in her upbringing and no part in the miracle of that night. The peacock could have easily become someone’s meal. I am sure the members of the Committee have never been in a situation where they have contemplated eating a fancy pet. This was food for our people, not exotica. I saved it from becoming someone’s dinner. And as far as her upbringing is concerned, I take full responsibility.

And what about the other witnesses, those who have nothing to do with the Sacred, or the Church, and those who hardly knew Alice Bhatti? There were at least eight witnesses who swore they saw a Toyota Surf floating two feet above the ground with its hazard lights on just before the likeness of our Holy Mother appeared on the roof of the OPD.

And what about the miraculous recovery experienced by that fat legless wretch who hobbled around the hospital with a skateboard stuck between her arse cheeks begging for Xanax? The lame shall walk, we were promised. And here the lame were skateboarding up and down a ramp so steep that even our ambulances find it hard to negotiate it.